On 27 February, we said that we would *remove* the articles, not retract them — because as they were so obviously nonsense we thought they needed to be taken down as quickly as possible. Retractions are usually initiated by editors or authors, whereas in this case we thought immediate action on our part was justified and appropriate.

However, retraction is the best available mechanism for correcting the literature and ensuring its integrity (including details such as pagination). In order to include a placeholder notice and explanation on all platforms, the technical retraction process was initiated and the articles are marked as “retractions” – in spite of the fact that the fake articles are not typical examples of retractions.

Those authors of the 18 articles that we have been in contact with have confirmed that their submissions were not intended as a hoax. The intention seems to have been to increase their publication numbers and to increase their standing in their respective disciplines and at their institutions.

There will always be individuals who try to undermine existing processes in order to benefit personally and, unfortunately, scientific publishing is not immune to fraud. We are taking this issue very seriously, and have implemented the measures below.

Additional measures taken

1. More rigorous minimum requirements have been implemented and will apply to all new conference proceedings projects.

2. Springer’s editorial processes for conference proceedings are being intensified, and the monitoring of the peer review process of conference proceedings manuscripts accepted for publication will be increased.

3. An automatic SCIgen detection system is being integrated in Springer’s submission check system, and we will offer this system to our conference proceedings partners, who will be trained in its use.

We would like to stress that the investigation continues apace, and once it is concluded, a final report will be issued publicly.

The notices all look like this, with names of the papers and the authors changed:

Several conference proceedings have been infiltrated by fake submissions generated by the SCIgen computer program. Due to the fictional content the chapter “Developing Write-Back Caches and Information Retrieval Systems with EASEL” by “Mingqian Wang, Yingying Wang, Yueou Ren and Xi Zhao” has been retracted by the publisher. Measures are being taken to avoid similar breaches in the future.

Enough already! It’s time for a “Reviewers’ Hall of Shame.” Having a listing of reviewers (and maybe editors, too) who let these bogus articles slip by might be enough to initiate more critical review processes. It’s OK to say you “cannot evaluate” a paper … but to give a thumbs-up to the paper you don’t understand is malfeasance.

Is it just me that finds it slightly disconcerting that those examples detected to date have “Chinese” names and affiliations? Given that the only thing entered into the SCIgen is the name, is another point being made here?

How many of the 120 papers had “Western” names and affiliations? How many have been detected?